Television outside the set in “Old Master Q”

The other day, one of my students pointed me toward the Chinese manhua series ”Old Master Q.”  Created by Alfonso Wong in the early 1960s, the comic parodied aspects of modern Chinese culture such as consumerism, pop music, technology, and the increasing prevalence of the English language.

One of the most frequent themes taken up by the series is television. What strikes me about Wong’s work is the way in which the grammar of these jokes relies on an idea of the tv screen as a kind of permeable boundary.  Like Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot trying to figure out the “conveniences” of modern technology, Old Master Q bashes his set, flips it upside down, takes it with him to soccer matches, and tries to track the movement of images beyond their frame. The humor stems from the fact that each time, Q either assumes that the images transcend the glass plane of the CRT screen, or they actually do. Beginning with Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1914), there has been an established tradition of comics whose humor relies on play with panel boundaries, size and scale. Here, Alfonso Wong uses the tv set to embed this aesthetic within square, even panels.

“Old Master Q” injects absurdity into the way people understood tv sets to work, and in the process leaves an archive of potential and everyday television use in 1960s China. Most often, these jokes revolve around the gullibility of the Master Q (click through for larger images)…

…or the physicality of the images themselves, as if the tv’s content could literally bounce around inside the set:

But there are other panels whose humor reimagines modes of television spectatorship…

…or fictional televisions:

Lastly, a few of Wong’s best tv strips contain pointed critiques of television programming: